Unfortunate ESO Retcons (Gripe Thread)

[legoless]

Not quite sure how to eloquently open this thread, but I had to get this off my chest. ESO's time setting is messing stuff up.

The inclusion of many staple TES books in the game is a major, major problem lorewise. The developers simply aren't paying attention to what they're adding, and I cringe thinking of the consequences it will have on chronology. Already we're seeing the works of Bereditte Jastal and Herminia Cinna (human scholars of the late Third Era) appearing hundreds of years before their due publishing date. These aren't the only accidental retcons I've noticed thus far either (Pelagiad's existence being one of the more annoying inconsistencies in my mind). This is nitpicky, and really it should be quite easy to simply ignore, but this lenience with the time differences is destroying the canon, something Bethesda has usually strived to maintain to a pretty reasonable degree.

ITT: Further examples of ESO time travel and developer oversight, as they reveal themselves. If you've played the beta or been keeping up with the UESP's book collection, have you noticed any inconsistencies yourself? Post them here.

[CBR JGWRR]

Also the book mentioning Empress Kintyra, Varieties of faith: The Khajiit...


There are a lot of issues being brought up, and we've only just left Closed Beta, who knows what is to come.

[Minor Edits]

I could not agree more, and thank you for finally starting the "WTF" ESO lore thread.

The stuff they miss are eyesores, of course, but the practice of adapting texts for appearances 800 years before their time is inherently problematic. You can't just take a Third Era text, crudely chop off sections relating explicitly to the Third Era, and expect the rest of it to make sense in the larger context. We've known for a long time that Tamriel is technologically stagnant, but now it appears they're culturally stagnant, as well. So much for the idea of a cultural renaissance under the Septim Empire, because it turns out that so many of these works we've been reading have apparently been getting re-hashed for hundreds of years. This substantially, fundamentally reshapes the world we thought we were seeing.

On a related note, there are quite a few "First Editions" they've added of older books. The Second Era was supposed to be the dark age, not the Third Era. So how is that so many scholarly endeavors took place in the Second Era instead of in the Third? How come the Third Era has so little literature of its own? Fundamentally, it doesn't make much sense.

I'll edit in a few things I've seen in a bit:

Spoiler:

* Tamrielic Lore got reshuffled as Tamrielic Artifacts, sans author. So did Bagarn plagiarize it, did he write both, what? There are many examples like this.

* When they deleted a reference to the Septim Dynasty from The Amulet of Kings, they ended up trimming a bit too much, which pretty much epitomizes the sloppiness of the overall exercise.

* Morian Zenas and his apprentice Seif-ij Hidja were supposed to be relatively contemporary in the previous games, but ESO has retconned them as living and writing in the middle Second Era. So the paragraph in The Doors of Oblivion related to the Battlespire was chopped from the Online version.

* Which reminds me: someone at Zenimax got a bug up their ass about fixing each and every typo or grammar error they could find. This was a fundamentally misguided endeavor, in my opinion, especially when they decided to change dialogue in text. In many cases, they corrected typos which I would argue were clearly intentional "typos" to begin with, such as some alternate spellings of "Summerset" or "Vaermina". People rarely write perfectly, and often, there are regionally-distinct spellings and other writing differences between different groups of people. Fixing all these things probably seemed like a good idea to some OCD grammar nazi at Zenimax, but it was actually detrimental to the game overall, because they didn't give any thought to the setting, the syntax.

* The story in Racial Motifs doesn't perfectly mesh with The Doors of Oblivion, by the way. Zenas' expedition was apparently far more haphazard than how Hidja portrays it later. This could be attributed to his own pride or desire to applaud his master, but I thought it worth noting.

* Tal Margo Ker's Researches. The whole thing. It shouldn't have been included, period. Whatever information it had which they wanted to incorporate into ESO should've been put in the game some other way.

* The Alik'r: As illustrated in the link (if you can see past the markup), The Alik'r has, until now, indicated that Enric Milres lived in Sentinel during the War of Betony. That put his writings in a certain time and place, and by extension, did the same for all of his contemporaries which are mentioned in his texts: Weltan, Pellarne Assi ("The Brothers of Darkness"), and Ynir Gorming ("Fire and Darkness"). But ESO changed this so that it says instead that he's writing during the Alliance War. Just plucked a whole group of people and threw them back in time.

* Admonition Against Ebony made a surprising return. No one had bothered to make a lore page for it because it was not expected to be reused. But, sure enough, they just omitted the sentence about Dragonsreach and slapped it into the Second Era. Would it have really been so hard to make an original note giving the same information?

[VirtualWeasel]

I knew this was going to happen, because this game is being made by the big business mogul, not by the people who actually give a [&@%!].

[All hail!]

:/

[Minor Edits]

Another one: Father of the Niben was flung back in time. The writer, Florin Jaliil, mentions Waughin Jarth and Potema in it, so ESO chops that part out and treats it as a Second Era text.

[Aranel]

I was always under the impression that ESO can't necessarily make any retcons, and that Bethesda was there only to approve some lore-specific stuff (things about the races, like the bosmer and maormer, and what have you), so ESO was close to actuality. But I assume/d that ESO's lore/history/etc is basically non-canon until Bethesda decides to make things canon in an official TES game, assuming they want to touch it at all. Seems like a good idea to me anyways, since it allows Beth to pick the "cream of the crop," so to speak, and anyone could handwave the other parts of ESO as being in a "what if" or alternate universe or whatever.

That said, that's really lazy (or a huge oversight) that they decided to recycle books like that, that haven't even been written yet. Of course, I assume a lot of the people that are plugging it in aren't lore experts - and the only people who are probably are the only ones writing new books and doing stuff on the mythos, races, and whatnot. (Which I assume a lot of Bethesda people probably review anyways)

[DragonoftheNorth]

Hey guys, what if we all just agreed that this game doesn't count?

[Minor Edits]

A lot of the new lore is good. I just wish they'd had more of it instead of butchering old lore. If nothing else, it would have made editing a whole lot easier.

[GodsBePraised]

I'm of the opinion that the authors of certain books is a topic that really doesn't matter at all. And I really give zero cares whether they set a book's publishing date back.

[legoless]

A lot of the new lore is good. I just wish they'd had more of it instead of butchering old lore. If nothing else, it would have made editing a whole lot easier.

Agreed. I've also noticed some of the new lore focusing on topics that we've covered on UESP. The Glenmoril Wyrd has its own book and even ties in some Daggerfall lore (although they seem to have missed the part about the dozens of urban covens in the game). Old Ebonheart is apparently a thing, even though for all appearances mainland Ebonheart seemed to have been retconned out - which I'm pretty happy about since I wrote the article. Sutch gets a mention, even though it's completely obscure. It's nice to see, although also slightly worrying if the wiki has some mistakes that end up canonised.

I'm of the opinion that the authors of certain books is a topic that really doesn't matter at all.

Except when suddenly we have immortal scholars and ancient literature being passed off as recent research.

[Kerr]

I was worried this would happen, can't say I'm surprised it did. It isn't the first time these things have happened. It was something that bothered me in Dawnguard. Serena's mother Valerica apparently went into hiding before the rise of Tiber Septim (Serena wasn't aware that there was an empire from Cyrodiil) yet her library which nobody had entered since she went into hiding had multiple books published after that. So either she got her books from the future or the developers didn't think it through. It happens with other things too. A huge Dwemer ruin in Solstheim that wasn't there 200 years ago or some ancient ruin having loot that logically it shouldn't have. Although loot being in places it shouldn't be is an almost universal RPG trope. Spiders seem to carry a lot of gold.

[Minor Edits]

Yeah, that issue reoccurs in every game. They give some thought to the placement of books in the game world, but by and large they're just pieces of loot placed at random, thus you inevitably get, say, a volume of The Wolf Queen in an area that, lore-wise, had been supposedly untouched for thousands of years. That can be dismissed as a game mechanic limitation, as opposed to a lore retcon.

[Eltee]

The existence of Cropsford, that town you helped found in Oblivion, was rather annoying.

[AngryNord]

Who cares? ESO won't last long anyway, likely F2P in about six months, probably shut Down in max a couple of years.

[Ilaro]

The existence of Cropsford, that town you helped found in Oblivion, was rather annoying.

Actually you only rebuild Cropsford in Oblivion. nevermind

[AngryNord]

Well, no, the buildings have only been started when you find the location in Oblivion...

[All hail!]

I'm calling it now, Raven Rock will be in the game.

[Mattbott]

A lot of the new lore is good. I just wish they'd had more of it instead of butchering old lore. If nothing else, it would have made editing a whole lot easier.

to Beth these games are a labour of love, and this is very apparent in aspects of the game like lore books.. perhaps the ESO production team don't have that time luxury

spose we can expect a novella explaining how the college of winterhold library was zapped back in time and its contents scattered throughout the chests and bookshelves of 1st era Tamreil

[CBR JGWRR]

2nd Era Tamriel.

Of course, you're still correct as the College doesn't exist yet.

[Minor Edits]

Say what now? The College of Winterhold doesn't exist yet?

Mirabelle Ervine in Skyrim: "The College of Winterhold has been a fixture in Skyrim for thousands of years."

It just seems that for some reason, the College's library only dates to the late Second Era, presumably due to some kind of incident at the College. It's all on the lore page.

[AngryNord]

There's no Dwemer observatory on Stros M'Kai. They actually took the time to recreate the isle roughly the way it is pictured in Redguard - but still they managed to "forget" the observatory...

[AKB]

It is quite possible the game is just still in beta and that certain errors, such as the missing Dwemer observatory mentioned above, will be corrected soon.

To quote the very popular John Bain, "Beta is beta".

[AngryNord]

Oh, really Sherlock, is the game still in beta you say? LoL how [&@%!] stupid do you think posters here are???? I guess this thread could just get locked and deleted then, after all, it MAY possibly maybe get fixed in the less than three weeks that remain until release. Then of course, it also may not.

[Musicman247]

I know your name starts with "Angry", but that's no reason to act like a jerk.

AKB's quote seems quite applicable here, actually. I've taken part in many Betas, and very rarely does the finished product not have significant changes from the Beta. A lot of times it's a "wait and see" situation.

That said, there's no reason we can't civilly point out inconsistencies we've noticed. Going past the point of civility over a Beta, though, makes little sense.